AlPO4-5 has been commercialised as a vapour adsorbent for refrigerators

Crystalline microporous solids are an important class of inorganic material that impact our everyday lives. Their ordered structures contain arrays of channels and voids several nanometres across, enabling them to selectively and reversibly absorb molecules based on their shapes and sizes. This has led to their widespread use as catalysts, molecular sieves and gas sensors. Research into their potential use as hydrogen storage materials for mobile energy applications is also ongoing.

However, microporous solids often crystallise slowly and typically require several hours to several weeks of hydrothermal treatment to achieve satisfactory yields, limiting their applications on industrial scales. Now, a collaborative effort from the University of Tokyo and the Mitsubishi Chemical Group has led to an ultra-fast method for preparing the aluminophosphate AlPO4-5. A combination of rapid heating and crystal seeding completes the synthesis within one minute.

TFA simultaneously cleaves all protecting groups from the precursors to form the desired oligosaccharides in quantitative yields

Oligosaccharides are polymeric carbohydrates consisting of a small number of monosaccharide monomers. They are essential to all cellular organisms, playing vital roles in cell recognition and signalling.

Automated methods are routinely used to prepare biomacromolecules such as peptides and nucleic acids, but similar strategies in oligosaccharide synthesis are far less developed. Oligosaccharides contain a large number of hydroxyl groups which normally have to be protected orthogonally, i.e. in such a way that they can be unmasked independently of one another. This poses a great challenge to chemists and has hindered progress towards automated carbohydrate synthesis.

Classical protecting groups for hydroxyl groups include benzyl ethers, which are generally removed via hydrogenolysis or dissolving metal reduction, and acetate, benzoate or pivaloate esters, which are cleaved using base-catalysed hydrolysis. While these reactions are well established, a high level of training in practical organic chemistry is required to carry them out, in contrast to deprotection in automated peptide synthesis, which can be as simple as shaking the protected molecule with an acidic or basic solution.

Xinyu Liu and Yao Li at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a series of acid-cleavable PMB- and NAP-capped 4-hydroxybutanoic acid and 2-(hydroxymethyl)benzoic acid ester-type protecting groups that act as surrogates of acetate and benzoate. Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) in toluene can simultaneously cleave all of these groups during the final stage of an oligosaccharide assembly to emulate the synthetic efficiency traditionally reserved for peptide chemistry.